No pain, no gain - sleep restriction for insomnia
A study exploring the patient side of sleep restriction therapy (essentially restricting the time in bed to the time that you can sleep as assessed by a sleep diary). The participants had suffered from insomnia for an average of 17 years. The study found that the insomniacs improved long-term, though as the title suggests, those suffering from most side-effects fatigue/exhaustion’ (100%), ‘extreme sleepiness’ (94%), ‘reduced motivation/energy’ (89%) and ‘headache/migraine’ (72%) in general improved the most.
Some data
Before After 1 month After 3 months
Time to fall asleep 40 20 21 minutes
Time awake 72 29 26 minutes
No pain, no gain: An exploratory within-subjects mixed-methods evaluation of the patient experience of sleep restriction therapy (SRT) for insomnia
Simon D. Kyle, Kevin Morgan, Kai Spiegelhalder, Colin A. Espie
Sleep medicine 1 September 2011 (volume 12 issue 8 Pages 735-747 DOI: 10.1016/j.sleep.2011.03.016)
